CHRIS RICE COOPER is a newspaper writer, feature stories writer, poet, fiction writer, photographer, and painter. She maintains a blog at https://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com. She has a Bachelor's in Criminal Justice and completed all of her poetry and fiction workshops required for her Master’s in Creative Writing with a focus on poetry. She, her husband Wayne, sons Nicholas and Caleb, cats Nation and Alaska reside in the St. Louis area.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

LI YOUNG LEE THE POET AND HIS PHILOSOPHY

LI-YOUNG LEE:

THE POET AND HIS
PHILOSOPHY

“Li
Young Lee has become the best selling, or has sold through the most collections
of poetry, even more so than Sylvia Plath in the last forty years. He’s
anthologized in every language there is.He’s really a pure poet – he’s trying to make the words evaporate on the
page.”

Thom Ward, Editor of BOA Editions

I can’t
remember the tale,

but hear his
voice still, a well

of dark water,
a prayer.

Excerpt ”The Gift”from Rose.BOA Editions

Her song ends,
but she won’t come, so he goes

in, to find

woman and child

asleep on the
bed.

He lifts the
small body

and lays him in
his little bed by the wall.

He lies down by
his wife.

Excerpt “The Waiting”from The City In Which
I Love You.BOA Editions

And of all the
rooms in my childhood,

God was the largest

and most empty.

Excerpt “Stations of the Sea”from The Book Of My Nights.BOA Editions

What won’t the
night overthrow, the wind unwrite?Where is the road when the road is carried?What story do we need to hear, so late in childhood?

Excerpt The Winged Seed.Simon & Schuster

Chicago-based poet Li-Young Lee considers his poetry and his world to be
synonymous.In fact, the same
thought process and tools Lee used throughout his childhood, adolescence and
adulthood to answer life’s greatest dilemmas, are the same processes and tools
he utilizes to write poetry.

He described himself as a poet who considers poetry to be all
encompassing.It is spiritual,
physical and it deals with life and death.Lee believes that all human beings, non-poets and poets
alike, have a natural need to “enact with a greater cathartic and
apocalyptic revelation that can be experienced or reached.”Through this revelation, Lee said
we may open ourselves “to psychic, cosmic voices larger than your
own.”This process is
spiritual, but to Lee it is also what defines a poem and what being a poet
actually entails.

“It
behooves us to think about the nature of speech,” he said.“All speech is done with the exhale and inhale of a breath.We feed our body within.It is up to us whether we are to exhale
poems or silence.”

Through the exhaling of the poem, the individual is able to experience “disillusionment”,
which according to Lee is a positive cathartic experience because through this
process one is “getting rid of illusions.”As a result, better wisdom is gained and through this wisdom God
or ecstasy is experienced.Lee does not limit poetry as the only art form with which this
spirituality can be accomplished, for “all art exists in a state of how it suffers
to justify its existence.”

Lee’s
existence - or rather his history - is a fascinating one.His father, the former personal
physician to Mao Tse-Tung, and his mother, a daughter of Chinese royalty, fled
from China, taking their family.After five years of living in many different countries in Southeast
Asia, in 1964 the family settled in Pennsylvania.Lee’s parents introduced him to poetry for the first
time.His parents read to him the
great Chinese poets (from the T’ang and Sung Dynasties), and his father, now
deceased and a former Presbyterian minister, read to him poems from the King
James Bible.

Lee originally planned to major in biochemistry and English, only to
discover poetry was what he was felt called to experience.The kind of poetry he wanted to write
escaped him through his early adult life, when he made his living by owning a
restaurant, working at a warehouse, making jewelry, and shipping books.“The whole time I knew I needed to write poetry,” he said in a
telephone interview.

Lee
came to the point where he had no choice but to write poetry.He utilized his biochemistry knowledge
to live tremendous poems – poems that are now in print and experienced by
readers everywhere.BOA Editions
released his three poetry-book publications:The Rose, The City In Which I Love You,
and The Book of My Nights.Simon and Schuster released his childhood memoir The Winged Seed.With many publications in periodicals
and anthologies, Lee is now recognized as a poet, memoir writer, philosopher,
and spiritualist.Perhaps all true
poets are philosophers and spiritualists to some degree; at least to Lee there
is no differentiation.“For
me the path of poetry is a spiritual matter.When we speak we say birds.When God speaks you get a bluebird.The whole universe, the whole cosmos is
made up of vibrations.”

These
vibrations are what make the language that creates a poem – or according to

Lee, allows the exploration to come to the surface,
and it is through this exploration a poem

is created.

Lee
described this process of creating as “the daemonization of a poet”,
meaning the poet is in a state of awareness of experiencing the divine, or
god.Thus the poet is not writing
a poem to his audience but rather conversing with someone greater than himself.The audience or readers are simply
witnesses to this very intimate communication.Lee insists he does not research nor study in order to write
his poems; he writes from experience.This experience is what brings the creation, the poem, to actual being.

To
Lee, the process of creation is a process that never stops.“I am on the job twenty-four hours a day.My family members are always asking why
I am so distracted.I’m absorbing
it.I just absorb it.”

Lee described the process of absorption of poetry inseparable from the
absorption of life – from the most mundane detail such as a watchband to the
most mysterious facet of life such as the cosmos.“I am looking at the watchband.How did this watchband come to be on my wrist?What about the watch itself?I have to account for the person at the
jewelry store.How did I come to
be?All the food I ate – all the
air I breathed.Everything is made
from everything else.Everything
exists at the totality of causes-
it isn’t one thing that causes something to be.So many things happen to make us continue to exist.Anything we look at – the cosmos
conspires to make things happen.Everything conspires to make this watch.”

And
just as everything is conspiring within everything else, there is the poem – a
poem that is made up of everything – in the form of vibrations, which Lee
described as that which is “written
for the human voice.”And
to Lee, the greatest poet of all is God.“I would love to read my poems to God.God is immense – in every nook or cranny – in the whole cosmos.All energy comes from God.”

From
this energy great poems are written, and despite Lee’ s poetry awards, he
believes he has not accomplished the goal of writing that “great poem”.Lee characterized a great poem as
being exploratory and accessible to both reader and creator.

“My hope is that in my poem the
person has somehow gotten access (and is) suddenly living at the center of the
totality of causes, which is the poem itself – the locally inflective voice of
The All.”

Perhaps
what makes a great poem is the attitude and the motivation of the poet.Why does the poet create?Along with the attitude comes the
actual process of writing the poem – first within one’s mind and then on paper,
where Lee prefers to write in longhand at his kitchen table.“The right motive is exploration – discover
the unknown – go right there to live- where the human mind is born.Each person discovers his or her own
process.”

Lee’s books of poetry have been described as mystical, full of cultivated
rage, lyrical, metaphorical, spiritual, and metaphysical.His poems are experiences of
relationships, the search and meaning of life, the importance of silence, the
dominant figure of a father, tormented childhoods, and the meaning of the
cosmos, as well as to experience of ecstasy, or God.Lee’s poems, based on these universal themes, have been
received and favorably recognized by readers and scholarly poets
everywhere.

Lee has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants:the Lannan Foundation Literary Award,
the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation, the PEN
Oakland/Josephine Miles Award, the New York University’s Delmore Schwartz
Memorial Poetry Award, the Whiting Award, the Guggenheim Award, the I.B. Lavan
Award, Illinois Arts Council Grant, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Grant, William
Carlos Williams Award, and the National Endowment for the Arts Grant.

Despite these many poetry honors and great acclaim, Lee insists he is not
the great poet he wants to be.“I’m still just a beginner.I want to someday just write great poems.”